By now, you’ve probably heard that several far-right elements wasted no time at all claiming that Sunday night’s horrific shooting in Las Vegas was a false flag. But as it turns out, that has been but one of many outright hoaxes and lies that spread about this tragedy for much of Sunday night and Monday.
Possibly the most insidious and deadly of these involved an attempt to sleuth out the identity of the gunman. When word got out that a woman named “Marilou Danley” was a person of interest in the hours after the shooting, a number of right-wingers discovered that a woman of that name might have been married to a man named Geary Danley. Based on his now-archived Facebook page, Danley was an open and unashamed liberal. The reaction, sadly, was predictable.
https://twitter.com/iJMacauley/status/914788657126608896
Is this the Mandalay Bay shooter? Another violent leftist?#mandalaybay #route91harvest #PrayersForLasVegashttps://t.co/tp3u2r7ljd
— Deplorable Steve?? (@1776PatHenry) October 2, 2017
https://twitter.com/Ismail_Jahan1/status/914776851612024832
A 4chan thread about Danley quickly went viral, as did an article created about him on Everipedia. Gateway Pundit also picked up on it. Abby Ohlheiser of The Washington Post discovered that long after Stephen Paddock was comprehensively identified as the shooter, a Google search for Danley turned up several pages of news sites, YouTube videos, and 4chan threads fingering him as the shooter.
There were other, slightly less insidious lies bouncing around the tubes. Buzzfeed compiled some of the more outrageous ones. For one thing, several memes popped up fingering a guy bearing a striking resemblance to comedian Sam Hyde as the gunman. Lately, deplorables have taken to sharing pictures of Hyde after mass shootings. They also continued to post stories about Marilou Danley long after police established that she wasn’t even in the country on Sunday night. There have also been dozens of tweets about supposed victims and missing persons, as well as videos of supposed “crisis actors” intended to help convince the public that this shooting was real.
Once Paddock was fingered as the shooter, the Islamic State tried to claim responsibility, saying that Paddock was really one of them–without offering any evidence. No one believed it, in part because it would be monumentally stupid for ISIS to take credit for any disaster that takes place on American soil.
Tellingly, not even the wingnuts believed it, even though an ISIS-inspired attack would have fit their narrative like a glove. In fact, a number of memes tried to paint Paddock as a liberal and antifa supporter–despite no evidence whatsoever that he was ever politically inclined.
Unfortunately, Google and Facebook deserve much of the blame for these rumors gaining any kind of traction at all. For much of Monday morning, Facebook’s Safety Check page on the shooting was a steaming pile of fake news stories. Many of those same links made their way onto Google’s list of stories about the shooting.
Google and Facebook both apologized for the bugs in their algorithms. But they should count themselves very lucky that those bugs didn’t result in an innocent man’s reputation being ruined.
(featured image: screenshot courtesy KSNV via NBC News)
